


The Raskov Story

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [150]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alien Artifacts, Backstory, Canon Compliant, Essays, Fix-It, Gen, How Normals Get Away With Murder, Interplanetary Expeditions | IPX, Psi Corps, Rogue Telepaths, The Earth Alliance Justice System Is Broken, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-01-17
Packaged: 2019-10-04 17:21:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17308712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: A big fix-it of a canon story from the Psi Corps trilogy (and why the story matters).The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!





	The Raskov Story

**Author's Note:**

> New to _Behind the Gloves_? What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

In 2148, in the later days of the MRA (before it became the Corps), a telepath named Raskov was murdered in San Diego. He worked for IPX.

Now, there's a few issues with the story as its told in canon. 2148 was before the Centauri landed and gave Earth access to jumpgate technology, so humans hadn't traveled farther out than Mars. The story tells of some of the first alien artifacts found there.

As I understood it (and maybe I'm wrong), IPX became a very wealthy company because they would send archeologists to distant worlds, and in addition to studying these once-inhabited (but now uninhabited) planets and their cultures, they would loot the place and sell everything they could. Then they would use the money to fund the next expedition, and get fabulously rich in the process.

So how are they are megacorp, with super expensive labs and vaults more secure than that of most governments in their San Diego headquarters - before they've ever found anything they could sell? I mean, this story is about their attempts to sell the very first alien artifacts they'd found. (And "Interplanetary Expeditions" is a pretty presumptuous name for a company that's just starting out and can't get farther out than Mars. I'd buy their ego, if their financials made any sense.)

We're also still stuck with the major timeline problem as I laid out in the beginning of the book, in a [lengthy note under my partial timeline](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22701686#workskin):

          Canon is inconsistent with the dates of key events such as the nuking of San Diego, the third World War, the formation of the Earth Alliance, and the dissolution of the UN, and even more so when these dates are cross-referenced with those given for the formation of the MRA and the Corps. As canon is written, the Centauri arrive in 2156, world peace breaks out, but then San Diego is nuked in a major global war around the same time. _And the Sky Full of Stars_ gives the date of the nuclear attack of having been “over a hundred years ago” as of April 2258.

          According to Dark Genesis, Kevin Vacit visits the IPX labs in San Diego on January 18, 2148, with no mention of San Diego other than as a vibrant, beautiful city. (“I’ve heard San Diego is a beautiful place. Food. Wine. Tijuana a very short trolley ride away...”, p. 102). Yet according to _And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place_ , San Diego was destroyed in WWIII, and no WWIII is described in canon at this late a date; WWIII is implied to have taken place much earlier, in the end of the 21st century.

          This inconsistency is partially resolved by postulating that the nuking of San Diego did not take place during WWIII, but was a separate event carried out by terrorists between 2148 and 2156. This is the timeline _Behind the Gloves_ follows. The date of WWIII, however, cannot be determined, and presumably happened at the end of the 21st century.

          Nor could San Diego have been rebuilt for the visit in 2148 as described in Dark Genesis, because _The Fall of Centauri Prime_ describes San Diego as ruins, over a hundred years later.

          There is no way entirely to resolve these internal inconsistencies.

          My "resolution" is that WWIII happened much earlier, and San Diego was nuked between 2148 and 2156.

So we have IPX, or the company that would later spin off IPX, and some alien artifacts they've just discovered on Mars.

Well, they tried to study them, but that didn't offer up much information. They suspected the artifacts them to be some kind of organic technology, so someone high in the company decided, "let's get one of the telepaths to try to scan it." Raskov was one of the telepaths who worked with the company, he was unmarried, and he had no children. He had been cut off from his birth family since he developed telepathy. And so he's the guy they picked.

The artifact turns out to be a fragment from a Vorlon ship, not that anyone knew anything about Vorlons back then, but just to explain things. (The Shadows and the Vorlons had a big battle in Earth orbit a thousand years before the show. Some fragments survived the descent through the atmosphere and have been found over the years - one is mentioned in canon - but they're rare. I assume the Vorlons and the Shadows also fought near Mars, given how many pieces of Vorlon and Shadow ships turn up there.)

So Raskov touches and tries to scan the fragment, and he can confirm that it's alive... _sort of_... but can't offer more information than that. (IPX actually gave _him_ more information than he gave _them_ \- when he accompanied the director of research, Dr. Stoddard, into the secure lab, he couldn't help but pick up on the password Stoddard was entering to open the lab. He wouldn't even have had to scan Stoddard for it - Stoddard was in the process of entering the password, so this would just be "passive surface thoughts" plus paying attention.)

Anyway, with more confirmation that the artifacts are of alien origin, Stoddard and company decide to sell the artifacts on the black market to other countries. (The EA is not yet global, and major powers such as Russia and China are not yet in the EA.) The artifacts were supposed to be EA property, not IPX property, but they decided to sell them anyway.

They also decide to pull an insider trading scheme and make the announcement about the artifacts after they've already bought up lots of their own stock.

Not wanting to tell any more people about the artifacts than absolutely necessary, they bring Raskov back to monitor the (illegal) deal that would transfer the artifacts from A to B to C shell companies and so on till they could sell them to other governments. They figure they'll use the telepath they've already "tainted" with knowledge of the artifacts. They had some big complex scheme cooked up, and were just waiting for final confirmation (via Raskov) that the artifacts were organic alien technology before rolling out the whole plan.

So Raskov walks into a meeting - with Stoddard, a Russian and a German - where they're "taking notes" (but the notes that will be published aren't the real notes), and are plotting all kinds of illegal stuff. He's also been having a really hard time of it since he scanned the artifact - he hasn't been able to sleep, and whenever he could, briefly, his dreams were _really weird_ and filled with insects. There are insects EVERYWHERE. Butterflies, beetles, dragonflies. And since he hasn't slept in days, the insects are everywhere in his daytime, waking hours as well. He sees them in the air, on surfaces, on others, on himself.

(An amateur artist, he's filled up notebooks at home over the last three days with illustrations of all the insects he sees in his mind. He's just spent the last three straight days in his apartment, not sleeping, filling up notebooks with illustrations of insects.)

Anyway, in the meeting, he sees the scheme they're cooking up and he says he wants no part in it. This is, of course, what a telepath is _supposed to do_ when hired to oversee an illegal transaction, that's what the rules say, but it's risky for the telepath either way - if you cross a bunch of criminals, they'll come after you in revenge, and _mundane criminals_ , who now don't know how much you know about their criminal schemes, are _really_ going to come after you. But if you don't speak up and quit, then you're part of the criminal plot yourself, aiding and abetting it.

(As a side note, this is how a lot of good business telepaths get in Big Trouble with the law - they end up (through no fault of their own) getting hired to oversee something criminal - if they report it, they're likely to be murdered, and if they don't, they're likely to be exploited again by the same or other criminals, until eventually word gets back to the Corps, and now arrested and somehow "dealt with" by the Corps. This is one of the big dangers of "freelancing," but it can happen anywhere, even with large, established companies like here. It's less common with established companies because if a company is caught doing this, they will lose their right to legally hire telepaths at all.)

Anyway, Raskov takes the legal route. He tells them all no way, he won't be a part of this - he's clearly agitated, he hasn't slept, he looks disheveled - he tells them to go to hell and he walks out.

So then they plot how to kill him. They're worried he's going to spill the beans on their illegal plot, or even just about the existence of the artifacts, which would ruin their plan to sell them (and make money on their insider trade).

That night, mind still filled with insects, Raskov gets the idea that he has to "rescue the artifacts" from these evil men. So he sneaks into the building and past the guards (perhaps he distracts them and redirects their attention telepathically), till he gets to the vault. Canon is entirely unclear how he manages to get into the building undetected. He has the access codes to the lab, and even the vault itself, but then the system asks for a retinal scan, and he can't fake that, so he leaves.

The break-in attempt is registered by the computer, and Stoddard is notified, and he's _pissed_. He has the records of the break-in erased (as well as he can), and they accelerate the murder plot. He hires a rogue telepath to do the murder, so there would be no obvious trace back to them - and it wouldn't even look like a murder. (This tactic - mundanes hiring one telepath to kill another - is well known to the Authority, but there's not a lot they can do to stop it, as I explain in another post. That's why I'm talking about this at all.)

All the (very strong) rogue telepath needs to do, to kill him, is get line of site into Raskov's apartment - say, from a neighboring building.

And so it is that Raskov is found dead not long after, in his apartment, the door locked from the inside, and no sign of violence or forced entry.

But the story doesn't end there.

Kevin Vacit knows about the artifacts at IPX. He knows alien artifacts are powerful (he's encountered one before, at least once). He is notified about Raskov's death (the Authority is always notified when police find a telepath dead under mysterious circumstances), and he finds it _really strange_ that an IPX telepath in San Diego - young and seemingly otherwise healthy - just happened to die apparently of sudden stroke. The whole thing feels wrong, so he decides to personally pay them a visit.

Meanwhile, there's some more unexplained shenanigans going on at the company, because one of the two guys in the meeting with Stoddard - the German guy, ostensibly from a small Canadian biotech firm, but it's also part of a much larger international conglomerate - has also "gone missing" in some mysterious way that's got the whole company worried. The administrative assistant was told to lie to the authorities and say "he's been transferred to the Sandakan office" (and that explains why no one can reach him? how?) and no one has any idea what's happened to him, or even why he's disappeared.

It appears that when it came to the sale of these artifacts on the black market, different criminal groups were vying for them and trying to double cross each other in some way, and poor Raskov was caught in the middle of _all of it_. Whatever happened with these groups would be the business of the mundane police, not the Metasentory Authority, so Vacit etc. don't pursue it. (They can't even prove that Raskov was murdered without breaking the law, as I explain later.)

Kevin Vacit and his aide, a Metasensory agent named Ninon Davion, show up to investigate (even though there is actually very little they can do). Stoddard is nonetheless surprised and alarmed at their presence (Vacit is number two to Crawford), but acts like nothing at all is going on. He shows them Raskov's apartment, which they also investigate. They know Stoddard is hiding things, but they can't scan him, so they just know he's hiding something about the artifacts.

This isn't very much to go on.

They get the (fake) transcript from the administrative assistant, who tells them about the German guy's "reassignment." Really, she has no idea, she's scared what happened to him, and what might happen to her, too. Why she's scared for her own life, they also don't find out. They just know that from her (very worried) surface thoughts.

But they quickly determine that the transcript is a fake (how they do so is unexplained), and also (somehow) find out that the break-in data has been tampered with, and go back to Stoddard.

Again, they have nothing to go on. There is no physical evidence that Raskov was murdered, and the law shields any normal from being scanned - so even if they did scan him, they would be able to do nothing with it. (If they used that information to find and scan the rogue telepath, even that would be inadmissible in court, since they had to scan normals to find that rogue telepath. They could do whatever they wanted to the rogue telepath (for being a rogue), but they couldn't use anything that rogue knew in pursuit of these normals for their crimes.)

Super ironically, it was Vacit himself who had a hand in setting up and supporting these very laws when he worked for Crawford in the beginning - a fact he realizes and points out, though Davion has no idea what her's talking about. More on that later.

So Vacit bluffs his way through the problem. He confronts Stoddard with the whole thing - the plan to sell the artifacts and the insider trading, Raskov's role, Raskov's attempt to break in and the cover-up of that attempt, and the murder of Raskov. Stoddard denies the whole thing, but from his surface thoughts, they know they're on the right track. Vacit repeats his "presidential clearance" to see the artifacts, and insists that Staddard show him and Davion the artifacts, and so he does.

Davion removes one of her gloves and touches the artifact, confirming that yes, it's some kind of alive. (Why she did so knowing what happened to Raskov, I have no idea, and why she also doesn't find her mind filled with insects, I also have no idea. Maybe because she merely touched it, and didn't try to scan it?)

Stoddard, meanwhile, thinks he can secretly call security while Davion (the only one he knows to be a telepath) is distracted with the artifact.

And that's when Vacit makes it clear he really never gave a shit about Raskov, or about the laws that make it difficult (if not impossible) to catch normals who murder telepaths - all he actually cares about is the artifacts.

Dark Genesis, p. 112-113:

          "Some men are coming up, with guns," Davion said, suddenly. "He signaled them with some kind of silent alarm on his link."

          "How far do they have to come?"

          She stared at Stoddard until a sweat broke out on her forehead. "A few floors."

          "Five minutes or so?" He shrugged. "Dr. Stoddard, by that time our own team will have the building secured. You didn't think I would accuse you, here, without adequate preparation? You've played a violent card for no good reason."

          Now Stoddard started to cry in earnest. Tears ran down his face.

          "There, there," Kevin said, without any actual sympathy in his voice. "It isn't as bad as you think. Stand your troops down so we can avoid any unpleasant little firefights, and I'm going to explain to you how you're not only going to avoid prosecution, but retain your position, as well. Do you understand? Is this getting through? The only difference is that you will no longer be dealing with Kuchinsky-Behn, or anyone outside IPX. Anyone, that is, save _us_."

          Stoddard's eyes were beginning to clear. "But Raskov-"

          "Died of natural causes. Though I will insist that the Authority receive very high compensation for what was obviously a work-related accident. Am I clear on this?"

          "Yes."

          "Stand them down."

          Stoddard went to a wall phone, punched in a number. "Code 4. Cancel," he said.

          "There," Kevin said. "You see what happens when you jump to conclusions?" He looked back at the artifact. "Organic technology. It's been tinkered at for centuries, with no results. Do you really think you can reproduce it?"

          "I - I honestly don't know."

          "But it seemed worth the risk."

          "Yes."

          "Next time - when you want to take a risk - come to us. I think you will find it much less dangerous-and much more profitable - than any alternative. Do you understand this?"

          "Yes, Mr. Vacit."

          "Ms. Davion, will you walk Dr. Stoddard outside?"

          "My pleasure, Mr. Vacit."

          When they were gone, he regarded the artifact for a long moment. "Who made you?" he murmured quietly. He reached his fingers out and touched the surface. For a moment he felt the most profound wonderment he had ever known, a surge, accompanied by that nagging feeling of familiarity. And insects, beautiful, creatures of starlight and mist, seemed to dart behind his eyes.

          He withdrew his fingers and went to join the others.

\-----

Of course, Vacit had no one to surround the building - he was there alone with Davion - and this was all a bluff.

Also, he shows himself to be a ruthless son of a bitch who doesn't care if individual telepaths live or die - or even that he's helped set up laws that allow normals to murder them and get away with it - so long as it helps him personally attain more power, though no doubt in his mind this is less about him personally than some "vision for his role in the path of the human race" or whatever that he's got going on, the same thinking that led him to the Vorlon on Venus, but also the same thinking that led him to set up the child abuse of Cadre Prime.

He cares that Stoddard believes him to have All The Blackmail Material on him (but not be able to do a thing about it, because he's the number two man in the Metasensory Authority, and a normal (or so Stoddard believes).

Vacit orders IPX to transfer the artifacts to the Authority, "for safekeeping." Stoddard has no choice but to comply.

And then when San Diego is nuked not long after, IPX and everyone else who knew about the artifacts declares them destroyed.

But the Authority has them, and when Department Sigma is eventually built on Mars, they're sent up there for study.

\-----

Also, in case you don't know, Ninon Davion is [Fiona Temple](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11892606) (later Dexter's) mother.

Translation: **These are Bester's grandparents.**

In case you missed it.


End file.
